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Want Our Personal Data? Pay for It

The posting, tagging and uploading that we do online may be fun, but it’s labor too, and we should be compensated for it

By

Eric A. Posner and

E. Glen Weyl

April 20, 2018 11:19 a.m. ET

Congress has stepped up talk of new privacy regulations in the wake of the scandal involving Cambridge Analytica, which improperly gained access to the data of as many as 87 million Facebook users. Even Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerbergtestified that he thought new federal rules were “inevitable.” But to understand what regulation is appropriate, we need to understand the source of the problem: the absence of a real market in data, with true property rights for data creators. Once that market is in place, implementing...